LINKUVA
Pre-1940: Linkuva (Yiddish: Linkeve), town, Šiauliai apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Linkuva/Linkovo, Shauliai uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Linkau, Kreis Schaulen, Gebiet Schaulen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Linkuva, Pakruojis rajonas, Šiauliai apskritis, Republic of Lithuania
Linkuva is located 45 kilometers (28 miles) north-northwest of Panevėžys. According to the 1923 census, there were 625 Jews living in Linkuva. In the 1930s, the number of Jews declined slightly. After the beginning of the war, a certain number of Jewish refugees settled in Linkuva.
German troops captured the town on June 28, 1941. Immediately after its capture, Lithuanian nationalist activists formed a partisan squad in Linkuva, which was headed initially by J. Jakubaitis and Jonas Tinteris. On June 29, 1941, the Lithuanian partisans started to arrest Jews and Communists, taking them to the Linkuva granary, which served as a police jail. Here they were interrogated, and more than 70 were murdered in Linkuva during the first days of the occupation. For example, on June 30, 10 young Jews were selected from the prison and taken to be shot near the Catholic cemetery. During the execution, 1 of them managed to escape.1 On July 3, 1941, 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) northeast of Linkuva, 32 more people were shot.2 On the previous day, July 2, 125 Jews—men, women, and children, both local residents and refugees—were taken to Šiauliai, where 57 men were put in jail. Later, almost all of these men were killed. The women and children were allowed to return to Linkuva. On their return journey, however, as they were passing through the town of Pakruojis, some of them were killed by local Lithuanian activists.3
According to the research of historian Arūnas Bubnys, the Linkuva partisan squad was reorganized into an auxiliary police squad in early July 1941, now headed by Lieutenant Petras Beleckas.4 The Jews who had survived the initial massacres were then locked up in the barns of David Davidson, probably before mid-July, establishing a kind of ghetto.
Accounts of the fate of these remaining Jews differ in the available sources. According to Pinkas ha-kehilot, all the remaining Jews were shot on July 23, 1941, when the barn ghetto in Linkuva was liquidated and up to 700 Jews (including some refugees from elsewhere) were shot in the Atkošiūnai Forest.5
On the basis of Soviet trials, Bubnys has reconstructed a more detailed version of the ghetto’s liquidation. First the Lithuanian auxiliary police brought the Jewish men to the Tsalke farm, outside the town, probably near the village of Veselkiškiai. The next day, on or around July 26, 1941, a small squad of German Security Police, assisted by Lithuanian auxiliaries, shot between 180 and 200 Jewish men into a pit. The Jewish women and children (about 200–300 people) were taken from the ghetto and shot about one month later in the Atkošiūnai Forest. The women were forced to strip naked first, and the Gestapo men finished off with pistols anyone still moving in the pit. After the mass shooting, the executioners returned to Linkuva for a bout of drinking. More valuable possessions collected from the victims, such as gold rings, were taken by the Germans to Šiauliai, while the Jews’ clothing was taken by the local policemen for their families.6 (According to another source, the ghetto in Linkuva was liquidated between August 5 and 7, 1941, by executing about 500 Jews, with 300 women and children shot in the Atkošiūnai Forest, 5 kilometers [3 miles] southeast of Linkuva, and around 200 men shot in the Dovariukai Forest, 4 kilometers [2.5 miles] northeast of Linkuva.)7
Only a handful of Jews from Linkuva survived until the end of World War II.
SOURCES
Information on the fate of the Jewish community of Linkuva during the Holocaust can be found in these publications: “Linkuva,” in Shalom Bronstein, ed., Yahadut Lita: Lithuanian Jewry, vol. 4, The Holocaust 1941–1945 (Tel Aviv: Association of Former Lithuanians in Israel, 1984), p. 306; Arūnas Bubnys, “The Fate of Jews in Šiauliai and the Šiauliai Region,” in Irena Guzenberg and Jevgenija Sedova, eds., The Siauliai Ghetto: Lists of Prisoners, 1942 (Vilnius: Valstybinis Vilniaus Gaono žydu muziejus, 2002), pp. 245–247; Dov Levin and Yosef Rosin, eds., Pinkas ha-kehilot. Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities: Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996), pp. 360–362; and J. Woolf, ed., “The Holocaust in 21 Lithuanian Towns,” available at www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/lithuania3/lithuania3.html.
Documentation on the murder of the Jews of Linkuva can be found in the following archives: GARF (7021-94-436); LCVA; LYA (e.g., K 1-46-1277 and K 1-58-39421/3); and YVA.
NOTES
1. Bronstein, Yahadut Lita, vol. 4, The Holocaust 1941–1945, p. 306.
2. B. Baranauskas and E. Rozauskas, eds., Masinės žudynes Lietuvoje (1941–1944): Dokumentu rinkinys, vol. 2 (Vilnius: Leidykla “Mintis,” 1973), p. 404.
3. Bronstein, Yahadut Lita, vol. 4, The Holocaust 1941–1945, p. 306.
4. LYA, K 1-58-39421/3, pp. 32–35, 69–70.
5. See GARF, 7021-94-436, p. 28.
6. Bubnys, “The Fate of Jews,” pp. 246–247.
7. Baranauskas and Rozauskas, Masinės žudynes, vol. 2, p. 404.
